Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

A masterpiece of Italian cinema? Frankly, it hasn't aged well. Considering that it's almost three hours long, surprisingly little happens. Even the title is slightly inaccurate, since Rocco (Alain Delon) has four brothers, but only one of them matters or has anything remotely interesting to contribute to the plot, so that final "s" could have been omitted. Character development is, for such a long film, painfully crude. Very near the end, a minor character has to actually tell another minor character that Rocco is a wildly implausible and absurdly over-simplified person in a desperate attempt to lampshade the way he's been written. And when somebody finally asks if it's possible to get Rocco's mother to be quiet, viewers may feel like applauding him, since any sane person will have wanted the shrieking one-dimensional harridan to shut up, or ideally die, from the moment she first appeared on screen. Which, unfortunately, is right at the beginning of the movie.

Annie Girardot's Nadia, the tart with a heart, is basically there to provide tragedy, so she's treated abominably by absolutely everyone, including men who are supposed to love her, and much of what happens to her is completely unbelievable. Rocco himself is so saintly that at times he comes across as borderline retarded, and the (very) slowly building tension between Rocco and Simone, the only brother who really matters, is in the end oddly fudged and anticlimactic, the final resolution being offscreen. Which is a problem, since this fraternal conflict, along with the love-triangle which sparks it, is the mainspring of the plot.

I honestly couldn't decide whether Rocco's ghastly caricature of a mother was supposed to be comic relief or we were meant to take the intensely annoying old hag seriously, but the excessive unpleasantness of this character, the vile treatment of Nadia, and the odd fact that any female characters who are neither horrible nor being treated horribly are given as little screen-time as possible (fans of Claudia Cardinale will be disappointed to discover that she's in the film for about two minutes), gave me the unpleasant feeling that the movie was made by people who didn't like women very much. And some of the subplots, such as the hatred which instantly springs up between the protagonists and the family of an irrelevant brother's fiancée for no adequately explored reason, appear to revolve around things that don't need to be explained to an Italian audience but are baffling to everybody else. Possibly the notion of grown men being completely dominated by their mothers and unconditionally worshipping them even if they're overacted ratbags is profoundly moving and/or hysterically funny of you're Italian? I wouldn't know, and I just found it unbelievable.

This is a slow, old-fashioned film riddled with skin-crawling misogyny. The hero is a slightly feeble-minded plaster saint who sometimes behaves appallingly out of excessive and obviously misguided loyalty to his family, the heroine seems to have almost but not quite caught on that she's a fictional character and is cynically resigned to being a puppet without liking it one bit, and everybody else is horrible unless they're a nonentity. There are some powerful scenes, but I didn't believe in any of these people, let alone like them, so I didn't care what happened to them. I think this is one of those films it's heresy not to like if you're a proper movie buff because it's Italian arthouse cinema by Visconti and all that, but secretly the entire audience wish they were watching the new Bond film instead.

This film is further evidence that, probably thanks to a certain Hobbit with a very precious ring, New Zealand is waking up to the fact that it has a movie industry the products of which might be of interest to people in other countries too. Which is good news for anybody who would like to see more English-language movies that are basically mainstream, yet are not straitjacketed by the Hollywood sausage-machine and are thus capable of being intelligent and original. We've already seen some fantastically imaginative films coming out of New Zealand recently, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if the long-overdue replacements for Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam are Kiwis.

That being said, "Housebound" isn't the best of them by a long shot. It isn't anywhere near as scary, suspenseful, or innovative as "The Babadook", or even remotely as funny as "What We Do In The Shadows". By the way, although the summary on this site doesn't make this clear, it's a comedy. Well, it is some of the time. Its biggest problem is that it's trying to be too many things at once, and they don't quite mesh. For starters, it's got an exceptionally bad case of Birdman Syndrome, by which I mean the promotional artwork prominently features an extraordinary-looking person who turns out to be barely in the movie. And in this case we're literally talking about "blink and you'll miss it". Which is a pity, because the excellent idea that the most clichéd "ghost" imaginable, somebody with a sheet draped over them, is absolutely terrifying in a situation where there are lots of things covered in sheets and suddenly one of them moves, is criminally underused, and not as frightening as it should have been, and would have been if this first-time director hadn't attempted to make several movies at once.

There are a couple of brief bits of gore, but this film wouldn't have come within a chainsaw's length of an 18 certificate if the maladjusted heroine hadn't used the f-word so much. Mostly it's trying to be a black comedy that keeps changing gear in order to be a horror film again for a while, or a whodunnit we don't really engage with or care about because the murder in the backstory is genuinely appalling, therefore it can't be shown to us since that would make the film truly horrific after all. And there are way too many nods to other well-known horror movies, including a hugely important plot twist involving the truth about who and what the sheeted phantom really is that owes so much to a lesser-known film by a very famous horror director that I can't even name the director in case it's a spoiler.

On the other hand, it's lively, inventive, and never boring for a moment, so you'll definitely get your money's worth. It's just not as funny or as scary as it thinks it is because it's trying to be both at the same time. For a master-class in how to do something vaguely like this if you're a first-time director with no money who really is a genius, see Guillermo del Toro's extraordinary debut feature "Kronos". For a truly bonkers no-budget horror comedy which I think may have been a major influence on "Housebound", see the uniquely deranged "Spider Baby".

This is pretty much the perfect war movie, partly because, with the exception of a few scenes in which things get spectacularly blown up, it concentrates on the small-scale human cost of war. Burt Lancaster was always at his best when he wasn't typecast as a two-dimensional square-jawed good guy, but was allowed to play somebody you didn't necessarily have to like all that much. In this film, as in "The French Connection", the suave, sophisticated villain is on the face of it far more civilized than the crude, uncultured, and rather unpleasant hero, but nevertheless what he's doing is completely and utterly wrong.

The basic plot - as the Allies invade France, the Nazis attempt to send a looted horde of priceless paintings back to Germany, and it's up to a few hopelessly outgunned French resistance fighters to stop them somehow - explores the various ways in which a train might be delayed or diverted under the noses of hundreds of extremely suspicious Nazis. And it does this very well indeed, with the heroes employing schemes ranging from extremely elaborate subterfuge to the crudest and most desperate of sabotage as their numbers dwindle, with numerous moments of truly nail-biting tension.

But what makes it a real masterpiece is the human element. Lancaster's hero is never at any point in the film convinced that art is worth dying for, and initially wants to simply destroy the train because all that matters is to deprive the Nazis of valuable items they could buy a lot of tanks with. It's his cultured Nazi antagonist who cares about art - specifically modern "degenerate" art that Nazis aren't supposed to like - so much that he disobeys orders in a fanatical attempt to get the train to Germany simply because he can't bear to be parted from his beloved paintings. However, once good people who really care about abstract things like France's cultural heritage start dying, our unsophisticated hero becomes as relentless as his opponent, because even though his comrades died for something he doesn't believe in, they believed in it, and he's not going to let their deaths count for nothing. But every time he has to risk and almost certainly lose yet more French lives to save some pieces of colored canvas, he struggles with the temptation to blow the damn train up, or just let the Nazis have the stupid paintings.

So you've got plenty of interestingly varied action at regular intervals throughout the film, heroes who are undoubtedly the good guys, yet scared, flawed and fallible enough to be believable as human beings, and a bunch of Nazis getting exactly what they deserve, though in ways that make it clear that, while the Nazis were very bad indeed, war is never good, let alone fun, and should be avoided if at all possible. What more do you want from a war movie?

This is one of the very worst films I've ever seen! And I've seen "Santa Claus Conquers The Martians". When I say it makes "Plan 9 From Outer Space" look like a masterpiece, I mean that literally, because at least Ed Wood was trying, however ineptly, to make a good film. What we have here is a first (and presumably last) time director who spells his surname "DaVison" because "Davison" isn't pretentious enough making a terrible movie on purpose in the belief that "so bad it's good" is a universal rule, without stopping to think that there might be such a thing as "so bad it's just bloody awful".

This film is aimed squarely at those annoying kidults who pretend to enjoy watching very old children's TV shows ironically. Some pretty big names in British TV comedy feature prominently in the cast (Mr. DaVison must be a whole lot better at talking people into doing ill-advised things than he is at making movies), and they seem to be doing their best, but since the script contains very little that's identifiable as a joke, they have almost nothing to work with. The best joke in the entire film is that one of the characters is nicknamed "Scrutty". Seriously, that's DaVison's idea of side-splitting hilarity! The publicity material places considerable emphasis on "Scamp The Rocket Dog", who turns out to be an ordinary dog in a cardboard spacesuit, appears onscreen for about five seconds, and has nothing to do with anything. Much is also made of a character called "Nurse Boobalicious" who doesn't seem to be in the film at all. This should give you some idea of how feeble the actual content of the movie is.

Every shot looks cheap and ugly because it's meant to, sometimes to the point where it's hard to see what's going on. The "plot" is deliberately confusing and nonsensical, but at the same time played mostly straight, so it's neither interesting nor funny, and is often incomprehensible. There's just about enough material here for a five-minute TV sketch, but even then it would look desperately weak next to Pete & Dud's "SuperThunderStingCar" Gerry Anderson spoof on "Not Only But Also" fifty years ago, or even Spike Milligan's gleefully ramshackle "Star Trek" parody in which a bunch of idiots pretend the upper deck of a London bus is the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Eight years before DaVison coiled out this woeful excuse for a movie, Larry Blamire (who, strangely, does not have to spell his surname "BlaMire" to show people he's a proper artist and everything) made "The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavera", which is precisely the kind of thing DaVison is attempting to do here, only it works a thousand times better, possibly because Larry Blamire knows how to write bad dialogue in such a way that it's funny, and doesn't have a mental age of twelve.

This film has literally nothing going for it whatsoever except that it's inoffensive, which in comparison with other dismally unfunny recent British comedies puts it marginally ahead of "The Fat Slags" and "The Sex Lives Of The Potato Men". In all other respects it makes "Howard The Duck" look like "Star Wars". Avoid like the Vulcan Death Grip!

This well-made, well-acted, extremely atmospheric film has one slight flaw. Nothing happens. Literally nothing. Well, not quite nothing. There's some squabbling, a punch or two is thrown, and at one point it even looks as if somebody might actually be shot! But of course they aren't. And everyone talks quite a bit, when they're not too weakened by thirst, hunger and exhaustion to feel like saying anything. The movie is summed up by a scene in which the travelers stumble across a vein of gold so rich there are nuggets strewn all over the ground. They gaze at this vast wealth with dull apathy and, because by this point water is all they care about, they can't even be bothered to pick it up. The viewer may by this stage in the movie be experiencing similar emotions.

You might expect a film like this to begin with the brave, determined settlers starting out on their journey full of optimism, and gradually becoming disillusioned as the going gets tougher. You know, like every other wagon-train western ever. Not this one. Meek, the stereotypical grizzled old guide, has led them a long way down what he claims is a secret shortcut only he knows about before the film even starts, so by the time we meet them they're already getting tired, irritable and hard to like, and they already don't trust Meek, who consequently has so little to do that he might as well not be in the movie.

An Indian is captured. They're beastly to him because they fear an Indian attack, but of course no other Indians show up, and the one they've caught spends a lot of time tied up saying nothing because he doesn't speak English. One of the girls is vaguely attracted to him. Is there an interracial romance? Nope. That would be too much like something happening. Then they decide, very reluctantly, to trust him because it's their only chance of survival. Does the action now commence? Go on, have a guess...

I gave this movie two stars because it's trying very hard. Unfortunately it's trying to do precisely the wrong thing. "The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford" also gives us a realistic Wild West with long stretches of nothing much happening, gunfights that are chaotic, panicky affairs or cowardly backshootings, and brutal, treacherous "heroes". But it's an enthralling and at times oddly beautiful film about complex, deeply flawed characters we care about even if we don't like them. This movie is just a bunch of tired, thirsty people getting ratty with each other in the middle of a drab, ugly desert in a story-arc that's had huge sections amputated from both ends so it's all middle with no setup or climax. Worthy, but oh so very, very dull.

Stage plays and movies are very different beasts, and it takes a lot of adaptation to turn one into the other. Therefore a great deal of explanatory dialogue from the original play has been cut in favor of "show, don't tell", with the exposition they couldn't do without confined to framing sequences in which the aged Salieri tells the whole story in flashback. The decision to allow all the actors to use their normal accents when they're mostly supposed to be Austrian or German, and the modernization of some of the dialogue, is occasionally a little jarring, but it's better than having them adopt "ve haf vays of making you talk"-style German accents for the entire movie, or speaking in that stilted historical drama version of English that doesn't permit anyone to sound natural or relaxed. They do in fact talk this way sometimes, but only when they're in the Royal Presence and are required to be excessively formal.

Visually, it's stunning. Modern Prague stands in very well for 18th. century Vienna, and since Mozart divides much of his time between staging operas and going to lavish fancy dress parties, the set and costume designers have plenty of opportunities to let their hair down. Of course, it goes without saying that a movie about Mozart has no problems in the soundtrack department, especially when internationally renowned performers are involved. Where it falls down slightly is in the oversimplification of the characters. It's a historical fact that Mozart was a rather irresponsible man with a childishly scatological sense of humor, but Tom Hulce turns the irritating buffoon dial up to 11 and gives him a laugh like a dying hyena and borderline mental retardation in order to emphasize how different he is from the frigidly repressed Salieri, to the point where, on those occasions when Mozart gets wrapped up in his music and stops behaving like the Fourth Stooge, it's easy to see why Salieri can't comprehend how this moronic clown can possess such talent, since the viewer can't believe it either.

F. Murray Abraham is far better as Salieri, a vain egotist so utterly self-centered that he's incapable of realizing the extent of his own selfishness, whose tragedy is that he's a good enough composer to know how much better Mozart is, and simply cannot bear the idea that this potty-mouthed fool has the talent he, a clearly superior human being, deserves and has always longed for. However, the character is just a little bit too one-sided, as well as being wildly unfair to the real Salieri, who seems to have gotten along pretty well with Mozart, and certainly didn't murderously hate him, let alone actually murder him!

I also had a slight problem with certain unrealistic aspects of the story (which is, after all, supposed to be about real people and events). Naturally, the screenplay being based on a play by Peter Shaffer of "Eqqus" fame, it's no big surprise that the symbolic Freudian psychodrama is laid on with a trowel. But although the closing section is very powerful, partly because the physically and mentally shattered Mozart no longer has the energy to be annoying, I just didn't buy the idea that Salieri's suitably Freudian but extremely far-fetched method of destroying his rival would stand the slightest chance of succeeding.

So overall, not perfect, but very good indeed, to look at as well as to listen to. Though if you're just going to watch it for the musical numbers, you'd be better off with a few CDs so that you can hear them all the way through.

If you've only got a vague idea what this film is about, and you think a movie about a washed-up movie star trying to prove that he's more than the superhero he played over 20 years ago starring somebody who just happens to be best known for playing a superhero over 20 years ago might be a wee bit too self-referential for its own good, you'd be wrong. And if you think this is a superhero movie because it's called "Birdman" and features a superhero prominently on a lot of the promotional material, you'd be wrong too. Be warned: if that's what you want, look elsewhere, because Birdman's barely in the film.

What we get instead, from a director outside the Hollywood system (and boy, does it show - I mean that in a good way), is a complex story which constantly veers from drama to melodrama to tragedy to comedy to wild fantasy and then back again with no warning at all. The camera is almost constantly on the move, and so is the plot, so if you want the cinematic equivalent of comfort food where you can switch your brain off and let a nice simple film wash over you, forget it! You really won't know where this is going from one moment to the next. Or indeed how much of what's going on in the main character's head is real, or at least might be.

Michael Keaton as the burnt-out, washed-up has-been who wants to prove himself as a serious actor on Broadway in a play he also wrote and is directing, but literally can't get that ridiculous Batman pastiche everybody still remembers him for out of his head is superbly disheveled, oozing desperation from every pore as he tries to cope with his impossibly temperamental leading man (an excellent Edward Norton), the ruins of his domestic life, his own terror that he doesn't really have the acting chops for this, an implacably hostile theatre critic, his drinking problem, bizarre mishaps such as accidentally losing almost all of his clothes in public, and of course that gravel-voiced imaginary friend who isn't so friendly and wants him to make "Birdman 4" even though he's far too old. Oh, and those uncontrollable telekinetic superpowers he may or may not actually have.

Relaxing is not an option during this film, because mentally it keeps you on your toes every second. If that sounds like too much effort to be fun, you'd probably be better of with a real superhero movie - there are plenty to choose from. But if you want to see something genuinely different that, from the very first utterly bizarre image, never slows down or lets up, and doesn't assume you're a moron just because you're watching a movie, you might find this film well worth a couple of hours of your time. Some people simply won't get it, but personally I'd call it a masterpiece.

More nonsense from the early seventies European exploitation cinema industry! According to the synopsis, this version contains two scenes absent from most prints. However, "the lost lesbian scene" is just that gratuitous softcore bit you get in every film of this type which has absolutely no connection with the plot so they could cut it entirely in countries that didn't allow that sort of thing without leaving any discernible gap in the movie. And "the notorious Nazi death baby intro", while genuinely shocking, disturbing, and surprisingly well-acted, leads the viewer to expect a grim, dark, and truly horrific movie.

What we actually get is pantomime for grown-ups with a little bit of blood and some gratuitous lesbians. The acting is terrible, and the English dubbing even worse (though neither of them is quite as bad as the day-for-night photography). The butler, who appeared in the intro to be a totally serious character, is laugh-out-loud funny when he shows the doomed stereotypes to their bedrooms, solemnly informing them for no reason at all of the ghastly murders that have taken place there over the centuries. And of course, everybody who lives in the creepy old castle the villagers are scared of mutters darkly about some curse they're unwilling to explain properly, especially today, the anniversary of that other thing they won't talk about either...

If it carried on like this, it would be hilarious! Unfortunately it sags very badly during the painfully long middle section, which is basically that bit you get in every cheap movie involving a random bunch of people in peril, where nearly all of them spend most of the film being selfish, nasty, and unfaithful to their spouses, so that you're not sorry when they finally get killed. Which in this case only starts to happen two-thirds of the way through, by which time these one-dimensional victims-in-waiting have long outstayed their welcome. And the monster which an early scene showed us, without letting us see the creature itself, to be an utterly nonhuman winged thing so hideous that its appearance could cause healthy people to die of fright turns out, when we finally get a look at it, to be somewhat underwhelming in the makeup department.

Sadly the ghastly deaths, when we finally get around to them, are a bit perfunctory too, and not altogether unpredictable. If, at an early point in the film, our heroes happen to stumble across a room containing, for no apparent reason, a guillotine, do you suppose somebody might at some point just possibly get their head chopped off? Gee, that's a tough one... On top of this we get woefully unconvincing gore effects, and a "hero" who, in addition to being a nonentity, doesn't get around to doing anything whatsoever about the problem until 15 minutes from the end. At which point the movie attempts to turn into, of all things, "The Seventh Seal". Which is quite interesting, but too little too late. Preferable to the real dreck (almost everything by Jess Franco, for instance), but I did find my attention wandering rather frequently.

This is one of Vincent Price's least-known films, probably because it's an attempt to replicate the formula of several of his better-known movies, especially "The Abominable Dr. Phibes", with much lower production values and a very weak script. However, on the plus side, it focuses almost entirely on Vincent Price himself in the rôle of a horror film actor who is at least half nuts (considerably more so towards the end) and may or may not be a serial killer, so basically if you enjoy seeing good ol' Vinnie giving it his usual shtick with no holds barred, there's a great deal of fun to be had.

Peter Cushing, who's almost certain to give at least a thoroughly reliable performance (so long as he isn't in a film involving Daleks), is up to his usual standard, but for somebody billed second, he's not in the movie all that much. Cult favorite Linda Hayden is suitably convincing as a character who might as well be called Doomed Slut. Robert Quarry doesn't really seem to engage with the proceedings at all. And everybody else ranges from hilariously over-the-top to absolutely dreadful, but mostly they're adequate. And making his only appearance in a horror movie, Michael Parkinson is himself, and has no valid reason to be there.

Unfortunately, the murders themselves are very pedestrian compared with the outrageous excesses of the films this one's trying to emulate, and there aren't enough of them. The willingness of several characters to not only harass, blackmail, and generally annoy somebody who dresses like V For Vendetta's evil twin, believes himself to be a fictional psychopath called Dr. Death, and has killed several people already, but follow him into dark isolated places on purpose suggests that this is meant to be a comedy, as does the fact that a TV studio uses fully functional death-traps as props and leaves cups full of petrol lying around all over the place for no reason at all. But apart from a number of standout scenes - the ones they clearly spent most of the budget on - the writing is very flat and strangely lacking in humor, as if they assumed their leading man could carry the film all by himself. Which, to a very great extent, he does.

All the same, apart from the horribly uneven tone - one murder they dwell on for ages seems gratuitously nasty and mean-spirited - and the excessive use of clips from other, better Vincent Price movies to pad the thing out, provide expensive-looking shots to put in the trailer, and allow them to pretend that Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff are in the film (this was made by Roger Corman's old company American International, so I suppose that sort of thing is to be expected), it's actually a lot of fun. The Halloween party's a hoot, especially Peter Cushing's choice of costume; I just wish they'd let us hear the Dr. Death Song all the way through. And Spider Lady has to be the maddest madwoman ever! Though seriously, what's with that ending? By the way, if you can't guess who's behind the mask very early on indeed, you simply aren't trying.

Robert Aldrich was a fearless maverick director who made films about unusual or controversial subjects, often involving protagonists who weren't the conventional clean-cut heroes you'd expect in those simpler, more innocent days (he's best known nowadays for co-writing the script of "A Fistful Of Dollars"). This is no exception - a movie made in Hollywood about how vile Hollywood studio bosses are. And when the opening credits show the main character literally cracking up, you know this probably won't be a comedy and there may not be a happy ending.

Jack Palance was nearly always typecast as a villain, but here he gets to play an anti-hero, a weak, selfish, rather unpleasant man who is nevertheless trying to be as good as he can be, and he's obviously enjoying the chance to be something more complex than a sneering psychopath and giving it everything he's got. The only problem is that he's still Jack Palance, and he can't help looking the way he does, outer space cheekbones and all. Which means that when Rod Steiger is obliged to come across as an infinitely nastier and scarier person than Jack Palance while Jack Palance is right there in the room, Rod, never the most subtle of actors, turns the overacting dial up to 11 and becomes so excessive that you can't believe they let this guy walk around without a strait-jacket and a muzzle like Hannibal Lecter.

This level of melodrama sometimes gets in the way of the viewer's suspension of disbelief. The basic plot - Hollywood actors may want to give it all up, including their vast fees, and regain their artistic integrity by appearing in highbrow stage plays and never making another popular film, but the studios mercilessly blackmail them into grinding out lousy movies forever - is a bit hard to swallow, and some of the supporting cast could have been better, especially the dreadful Jewish stereotype. And although in many ways it foreshadows "Sweet Smell Of Success" by a couple of years, it doesn't come anywhere near the heights of that film or its two magnificent central performances. Still, it's an interestingly dark and offbeat work that was very unusual for its time, and it's nice to see Jack Palance doing something less predictable than playing the bad guy from "Shane" yet again. By the way, the title is purely symbolic - big knives appear nowhere in the film.

I'm afraid I couldn't watch very much of this film. It's billed as action, adventure and drama, and was given an 18 certificate, so naturally I expected something a bit dark and gritty. Alas, within literally seconds of the start of the movie, it becomes apparent that it's one of those comedies aimed at people with a mental age of five. I actually had to check that I'd been sent the right film because I couldn't believe that anything this mentally retarded had an 18 certificate. Unfortunately it was indeed the correct movie. I flicked through a few scenes to see if it got a bit more adult later on, and apparently it does. Then I asked myself how many minutes of Sammo Hung's dismal attempts to be funny, aided by his even less amusing supporting cast, I was prepared to sit through to have the pleasure of watching some Chinese men I was already sick of hitting each other. The answer was, fewer than I'd already endured, so I hit the eject button.

An intelligent director can do this kind of thing well - see "Shaolin Soccer" and "Kung Fu Hustle", or the comedy interludes in John Woo's "The Killer". But done badly, as it is here, it's just sub-moronic pantomime face-pulling and hideous overacting from people who probably can't really act. If you have a very high tolerance for Three Stooges-style foolishness, you might enjoy the painful "comedy" you'll have to sit through a lot of to get to the action. And if you think that Sammo Hung's one-note schtick revolving around the fact that he's really good at martial arts despite being slightly overweight is intrinsically hilarious, you might need to visit the lavatory before you watch this just in case of laughter-induced trouser accidents. Otherwise, forget it.

I'm giving this film one star because that extraordinarily dependable character actor David Warner gives the totally committed performance he always does, even if the material he's forced to work with isn't that great, and another star because at least it means well. At a time when WWII was long over but national service was still a thing that young men had to do, bored soldiers perform guard duties with no apparent purpose in Germany while wishing they could just go home (the titular Bofors gun is purely symbolic and barely appears in the film). Our "hero" is a useless petty officer who will do absolutely anything to get that posting back to Blighty, but ironically, the very night before he gets it, he has one more routine session of guard duty to perform, which happens to bring him into conflict with Nicol Williamson's completely bonkers private, who threatens to screw the whole thing up.

It's not a bad premise, but, this being 1968, we have to have it rammed down our throats that all authority figures are automatically wrong, or at best stupid, cowardly, inept, or all of the above, and the army is intrinsically horrible even when it's not shooting at anybody. The scenario would make far more sense if the characters were trapped in Hell forever with one tiny chance of escape, rather than stuck on a military base in Europe for a few years, because the actions of absolutely everybody are stilted in the extreme. David Warner very nearly makes his character plausible (and full marks to him for that), but every single thing he does is stupid, and often stupid beyond belief. Nicol "point my teeth at the scenery - I'm starving!" Williamson is so one-dimensionally insane, evil, and utterly out of control from the get-go that the script has to provide a completely random reason for him being crazier than usual right now to justify it being plausible that the British Army would have somebody this obviously nuts in it for more than half an hour before noticing they'd made a mistake, and Ian Holm is wasted as the voice of reason who isn't listened to.

I think this must have been adapted from a stage play - it very much has that feel about it. The whole "military service for a fairly short time is worse than death" theme is so overdone that everybody is excessively desperate, unpleasant, or both - nobody in the entire film is genuinely pleasant, well-meaning or sincere, except trivially and momentarily. And the one brief scene that perfunctorily attempts to justify the antagonist's relentless vileness made me laugh because it accidentally channeled Monty Python's "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch.

Overall, clumsily excessive in trying to make its point while being no fun at all on any level. By the way, if somebody is supposed to have gotten hopelessly drunk on Guinness (which is black) and been sick all over his uniform, shouldn't he covered in a substance that isn't pure white?

In the wake of "The Dirty Dozen", it occurred to Hollywood that if your bad guys are actual Nazis, your heroes can be literally anybody else whatsoever except possibly demons from Hell and still be fairly heroic by comparison. This film tries to combine that idea with the basic plot of "Lawrence Of Arabia" - a small group of maverick Allied soldiers must cross a huge expanse of North African desert in order to accomplish an almost impossible military objective.

Unfortunately it doesn't do it at all well. Under-characterized people with occasionally baffling motivations do predictable things. It's no spoiler to reveal that, if three trucks have to be ever so slowly and perilously winched up a cliff (huge nod to "The Wages Of Fear" there!), the third one won't make it, otherwise why bother with that scene? But the extent to which certain characters are doomed from the get-go is just plain laughable. One utterly irrelevant yet quite prominent character is literally in the movie purely in order to be pointlessly killed for no reason at all, thus demonstrating the futility of war. Or something.

Even worse, our heroes don't really do all that much fighting. The Nazis are sensible enough to be largely absent from the desert, and while a director like David Lean could do something interesting with that situation, we're in lesser hands here. People who don't like each other bicker, and once in a while they get to be even nastier to whoever else they happen to bump into. There is literally nobody in this film whose survival you particularly care about, and for a war film, there isn't a great deal of war. Full marks for explaining, in case you didn't already know, that war isn't usually a good idea, but zero for making any aspect of it look interesting, even in a bad way. And why is Nigel Green third-billed? He's barely in the movie, unlike a lot of people you'll see nowhere else because they can't act. Stodgy doom-laden tedium. Even Michael Caine doesn't seem to be engaged to his usual extent. Avoid.

Firstly, ignore the synopsis - it was obviously written by somebody who hadn't seen the film.

Moving on to the film itself, it's basically a homage to the classic spaghetti westerns (there's a direct quote from "A Fistful Of Dollars" very early on), including the lesser-known comedic ones. Unfortunately there's one huge problem for non-Chinese audiences, and that's the comedy. The Far East has many cultural differences from the Near West, one of them being the style of humor that is traditionally accepted as being funny. The ridiculous level of overacting would in our culture be amusing to fairly young children but just plain embarrassing for adults, and although I may be missing subtle jokes that were lost in translation, the constant face-pulling, bursting into tears, and sub-moronic idiocy displayed by the supporting cast suggests otherwise.

Chow Yun Fat, an overrated actor whose reputation has more to do with the films he's been in than how good he really is, gives his default performance, suitably dumbed down and camped up, and is out-acted by costar Jiang Wen (who is also the director). The action scenes are nowhere near as numerous or as exciting as you might expect - the "epic" final battle consists mainly of lots of extras with guns running offscreen and presumably defeating several hundred baddies we hear about but never actually see - and are frequently compromised by crude, repetitive humor that jarringly shifts into drama we're supposed to care about with no transition at all. This applies throughout the film; one scene in particular (the one involving jelly) left me utterly baffled as to whether it was meant to be funny or tragic, and just came across as grotesque in the worst possible way.

As for the "everybody pretends to be everybody else" plot, I was both losing track and losing interest by the 10th or 12th time this happened. And the "capitalism is very, very wrong" message isn't a subtext, but a thuddingly clunky bit of propaganda so blunt that the hero seems to be overwhelmed by an obsessive-compulsive desire to redistribute wealth not unlike that of the Monty Python highwayman who steals lupins, while failing to do obvious things to the point where it has to be lampshaded by having other characters point this out (and getting a Marxist homily for their trouble).

If you want to see a recent genuinely action-packed pseudo-spaghetti western from this part of the world which sometimes gets a bit silly, watch "The Good, The Bad, And The Weird", which beats this film on every count other than not being quite as pretty. And if you want to see a movie of this type with Marxist underpinnings done properly, watch "A Bullet For The General", or quite a few other spaghetti westerns from the sixties and seventies, including most of Sergio Corbucci's output. But give this a miss.